ANTH 5340 - Ethnographies of Illness and the Body

It is often at moments of intense ruptures in the normalcy of the body’s functioning that individuals/societies reflect on the taken-for-granted assumptions about self, family, community, social and political institutions, the relation between normal and pathological, the roles of healers and patients, life, and death. Writing about illness and the body is a form of therapeutic action. Examines such claims and writings done by those facing bodily distress. Prerequisite: For undergraduates: ANTH 224 and 360, SOC 428; instructor permission for graduate students.